aries imposing revolution from above, picking up the pieces-to popular ac- claim-after the previous government had collapsed of its own corruption and ineptitude. Castro's con- quest was moral, not mili- tary. AN important problem .n of historical, and also of political, judgment is presented by Latin Amer- ica, where such impressive possibilities have always existed and so little has happened. Seventy-five years ago, Argentina, the most advanced of the Lat- in-American nations, demographically a Euro- pean society, was one of the world's wealthier countries and was com- monly considered the nat- ural leader of South America. Today, it is in catastrophic political con- dition, and its economic wealth per capita is lower than that of Gabon or Bul- garia. It is a formerly developed country. Brazil has prospered since the war, but Chile has retrogressed. Latin America as a whole seems to be of less consequence to the world, less creative (except, of course, in its literature), less seductive to the world's imagination than it was a hundred years ago. Its battles, the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier has one of his characters say, "because of an incredible chronological discrep- ancy of ideals... [seem those of] people living in different centuries." A second character replies, "You must remember that we are accustomed to living with Rousseau and the Inqui- sition, with the Immaculate Concep- tion and 'Das Kapital.' " Yet United States policy toward the crisis in Central America acknowledges only Karl Marx and the late twentieth cen- tury. It is curious that a government as sophisticated as ours, in a nation as sophisticated as the United States, should make the repeated error of at- tributing political phenomena of evi- dent historical and social complexity to simple external causes. This is the true analogy between the American reac- tions to El Salvador and to Vietnam. It is not that in these two cases the United States has put itself on the ...., y < . '\ " JJY". f 109 ---...... '\ T : 'r1 - !IW"-. :.t, 100& , .dA:$,; \ . \-: ' ""''''''''''''''^- . ..(0\:>>"'..... h .' L60 CJUUtL- " A nd another thing, Barry-you only pretended to love whales." < , '^'" - "f*_ . ---..... . "reactionary" side, or supported mili- tary rule, or the rich, or the status quo. In fact, in both cases the U ni ted States has ineffectually tried to find more or less progressive "third forces" between the hard men of the right and the left. The Christian Democrat J osé N apo- león Duarte represents just such a third force in EI Salvador. That is why he is so stubbornly defended by the State Department. Without him, they would be left with the generals. United States policy in Central America in the past was callous, sup- porting corrupt and complacent dicta- tors-S.O.B.s, but "our S.O.B.," as Franklin Roosevelt once remarked of a member of the Somoza family. Now the game has changed. The professed intention is to evoke from Central America progress, democracy, and liberation. And the United States, Cuba, and the Soviet Union are all, in one way or another, engaged in this arduous undertaking. They will all almost certainly fail, but not before they do a great deal of harm to a country that deserves to settle its own accounts. EI Salvador is a small country with a backward and illiterate population, although its la- boring population has been increas- . ingly politicized since early in this century. If the present uprising is in- deed a popular movement-and American diplomats concede that it is so popular that the national Army it- self cannot control it-this is because a peon class long and truly oppressed was driven too far. These people would eventually have taken up the course of revenge to sit in justice up- on their oppressors. For the United States to meddle directly in this, or to cause the intervention of forces from Argentina or elsewhere, or to enlarge the affair through covert operations against Nicaragua and Cuba, is to risk turning what is still a limited matter, bound up in a single nation's experi- ence, into something much larger and possibly uncontrollable. The policy of enlarging the war in order to win it, already tried in Indo-China, is capable of again bringing about the result that it is meant to prevent. But then that says too much. By carrying the war in Vietnam to Laos and Cambodia, the United States in- corporated them into a common disas- ter, which individually they could have escaped. The defeat in Indo- China did not, however, vault China into power over Vietnam, or Thai-